The Subversion API requires that certain output be written to a real file on the filesystem. So, for certain operations (such as getting a diff or the contents of a file), we need to be able to write to the system's temporary directory.

Listed here are other limitations of VCI::VCS::Svn compared to the general API specified in the VCI::Abstract modules (or compared to how you might expect the driver to function):

copied files always show up in added, they never show up in modified, even if they were changed after they were copied. This is because Subversion doesn't track that a copied file was modified after you copied it.

This is also consitent with how they show up in as_diff -- it looks like a whole new file was added.

Subversion doesn't track if a moved file was modified after it was moved, only that you copied a file and then deleted the old file. So moved files show up in copied, added, and removed instead of in moved.

VCI::VCS::Svn performs well with both local and remote repositories, even when there are large numbers of revisions in the repository. We use the API directly in C (via SVN::Client), so there is no overhead of actually using the svn binary.

Some optimizations are not implemented yet, though, so certain operations may be slow, such as searching commits by time. This should be easy to rectify in a future version, particularly as I get some idea from users about how they most commonly use VCI.